On Today's Episode

Episode Shownotes:
This is Episode 1 of ART ON THE BLOCKCHAIN with your hosts DJ J $crilla and Cynthia Gayton. In this episode we familiarize our listeners with who we are and what our aim is with the podcast. We speak to Adam B. Levine for an hour about tokensizing art, his projects Tokenly and token.fm and much more.

We live in a world powered by tokens. Your car probably still uses the old style—a metal key that completes an electrical circuit when inserted into the ignition. The key identifies you as the user and grants complete control to do as you want. Newer cars use electronic keys. Sometimes these keys simply need to be in your pocket, able to communicate their presence with a small radio and receiver. More generally the key is a type of token. And from your perspective, it doesn’t matter what it is about the token that empowers it to empower you. It only matters that it does.

Imagine instead of a physical key, the car is controlled by a one-of-a-kind-unique token that controls the door, locks, and ignition of your car.

That might sound complex, but your phone and your car handle almost all of it without you even knowing. You just have t... Read More

Open Source Hardware is a popular and growing movement. An organization (sometimes charity, usually a non-profit) develops hardware designs and specifications and publishes them to the open source without the desire or potentially the ability to produce the physical products exclusively themselves.

The Raspberry Pi project is a perfect example of this with two official stocking manufacturers who share back some of their revenue in compensation for their official status. This money supports further development. By adding three types of tokens to the ecosystem, what is a game for only the biggest of players can become a vibrant environment of efficient, decentralized and distributed reselling. Now distribution can start to take place.

This week instead of talking about a current Tokenly project, I wanted to get a little hypothetical and talk about one of the non-monetary uses of Tokens that I sometimes think about.

Tokens, Trains and Right-of-Way

Some time ago I was spoke with Birdie Jaworski, editor of Very Much Wow magazine about tokens and train intersections. Right now train systems have lots of dumb infrastructure (Tracks, switches, etc) carrying smart (automated) trains from smart station to smart station.

So trains and stations need to talk to each other in order to keep an accurate picture of where the various moving parts are. When those moving parts find themselves in the same place at the same time you get a news-worthy catastrophe.

Imagine for a moment we have unlimited funds and manpower to fix this problem. The simplest way would be to station a traffic controller at every single junction with a powerful two way radio, a brain and the ability to communicate with nearby trains.